The First Time I Had Sex After Coming Out

Losing your virginity isn’t necessarily the biggest first in your life. Here, one woman shares her most significant sexual first

By FLARE Staff

Date May 2, 2018

“The weight that straight people feel around losing their virginity, I didn’t have that. I never felt like I was in a big rush. The rush I felt as a queer person was to do something sexual with someone of my same gender, to officially cross over into that realm. I was a late bloomer. When I was at university in Montreal, my friend set me up with a girl who was young and didn’t speak the best English and lived in her parents’ basement. She smuggled me in one night and we started fooling around. I’d be surprised if the whole encounter lasted more than seven minutes; I kind of froze. So that’s arguably my first time, because it’s the first time I had a sexual experience with someone, but it doesn’t really feel that way to me, because I had no idea what I was doing.

After that, I had this tormented relationship with a girl who was dating someone else. We flirted over email, we wrote poems to each other, I really pursued her. For me, that experience holds the symbolic weight and ceremony of a first time: I had a huge crush on her, I waited and waited and waited, and then we finally had sex. There was a trajectory; there was music playing and good lighting. The sad thing is that I think she knew how much the experience meant to me—she couldn’t actually date me, but she could give me this. And then afterwards, she got a call from her real girlfriend and had to go.

I don’t know if being queer means I have more freedom to define what constitutes my first time. Maybe, to some people, it still has to be penetrative, like the first time you have sex with a strap-on. When I reflect on my sexual history, I can chart a whole series of firsts: the first time I felt totally grounded in my sexuality; the first time I started having really good sex; the first time I felt I was really directing a relationship. But there’s this weird thing where I could have all the experience in the world, and yet if I ended up getting together with a cisgender dude, there would still be this icky thing of my virginity. I mean, socially and culturally, many people would argue that I am still a virgin. I’ve actually wondered, on numerous occasions, if I should just put myself on eBay and auction my virginity off. At some point, a couple years ago, a straight woman did that, and I was like, F-ck, she got there first.”—As told to Danielle Groen